A Book Release Celebration: Natasha Mijares “Violent Wave” & Ahmed Ozsever’s “River, Red”
Join Bridge Books for the release of Natasha Mijares’ debut poetry collection, violent wave, and Ahmed Ozsever’s artist book River, Red, with readings by Mijares, D Rosen, Alex Wells Shapiro, and Ola Faleti. Moving between human and non-human lives, fragmentation, ecology, and transformation, violent wave uses sparse, electric language to explore the constant condition of change, while River, Red traces the shifting Texas–Oklahoma border through photography, archival research, mapping, poetry, and collage. Ozsever’s work is also featured in Nothing, But [Holes] on the exterior of the truck, extending the book’s investigation of landscape, memory, and unstable boundaries into the Festival site itself. The readings will be recorded and become part of Bridge’s Readings Archive.
ALLEN EDITIONS
Allen Editions is Bridge Books’ poetry imprint, dedicated exclusively to poetry and to work that expands the possibilities of contemporary poetics. We give particular attention to historically underrepresented voices and to writing that challenges inherited boundaries between literary, visual, sonic, and embodied forms.
For Allen, a poem may function as a diagram, instruction, score, choreography, map, archive, or method of inquiry. Language can organize a page, move through a body, or set an encounter in motion. Our interests include fragmentation, breath, phonemic experimentation, spatial notation, and the ways repetition changes meaning. We approach sequence, spacing, silence, image, and material as elements of poetic composition—not merely as packaging around words.
Our editorial approach also draws on cultural archaeology: writing that excavates place, memory, history, material culture, and lived experience. We welcome work attentive to what remains, what has been obscured, and what becomes legible through an unexpected arrangement. Poetry collections and formally hybrid projects belong within this shared inquiry, including works in which photographs, annotations, diagrams, found materials, or performed actions participate in the poem itself.
As part of Bridge’s artist-led publishing practice, Allen supports the sustained development of distinctive poetic voices through close editorial collaboration and considered bookmaking. We seek books whose forms arise from the demands of the work, creating space for poetry to be read, heard, encountered, and enacted.
Allen Editions launches with violent wave by Natasha Mijares.
Natasha Mijares is an artist, writer, curator, and educator. She received her MFA in Writing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has exhibited at MECA International Art Fair in Puerto Rico, The Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, TCC Chicago, and Locust Projects. She has been published in Container, Vinyl Poetry, The Gravity of the Thing, and Hypertext Magazine.
Ola Faleti is the author of fiction chapbook Soft & Solid (2024) and an artist and arts educator based in Chicago, Illinois. Her writing, including a collaborative poetry chapbook with Pitymilk Press, has also appeared in Voicemail Poems, Unwoven, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. Ola’s favorite number is nine. She believes there’s no such thing as too many flowers.
D Rosen is a sculptor, writer, and non-human animal caregiver who exhibits and publishes internationally. They operate from the position that questions of animality are not binary but rather a tangle of ecologies and richly complicated identities framed by culture. Rosen challenges anthropocentric epistemologies of the animal and offers sculptures as gestures, ritualized and sharp, toward unsettling harmful hierarchies of the animal while advocating for multispecies coalition-building.
Photo by @x.naut
Social media: @artdesaucedo
Alex Wells Shapiro (he/him) is a poet and organizer from the Hudson Valley, now based permanently in Chicago. He co-founded the performance series and artist’s collective Exhibit B. He is the author of a full length collection of poems, Insect Architecture (Unbound Edition 2022), and a chapbook, Gridiron Fables (Bottlecap Features 2022). His next full length, The Chamber of Commerce, is set to release with Baobab Press in Spring 2028. More of his work is available at www.alexwellsshapiro.com